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  #4401  
Old 01-26-2017, 11:12 PM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

The "plz watch all of it" was from copypastaing my fb post about it because my communist friends get up in arms about the Sanders wing. I am deeply at aims with communists but try to keep from starting shitstorm arguments that don't need to happen. My feeling is that they aren't really populists at all but that discussion is kind of irrelevant here.
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  #4402  
Old 01-26-2017, 11:32 PM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

I don't necessarily agree with such a voting system, either. I think supporting a movement concerned in any extent to remove corporate influence in politics is good, regardless if you support every aspect of their stated positions. As for Cenk/ TYT, I don't like them either. I find them kind of bigoted towards dissenting opinions of any kind and they completely lost me at refusing to acknowledge the Armenian genocide (saying they didn't have to because someone on their staff is Armenian descent, basically).
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  #4403  
Old 01-26-2017, 11:34 PM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

I quite like Secular Talk, though.
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  #4404  
Old 01-27-2017, 03:52 AM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

I've also noticed a pattern of sexism from Uygur. He does, of course, have the right positions on policies for women's rights mostly, it would seem (I haven't examined that, but I also haven't heard complaints about him regarding that). But I've noticed sexist jokes and commentary from him in the past.

I've seen similar sexism from liberal men like Keith Olbermann, Alec Baldwin and Bill Maher...

I don't say that means I'll have nothing to do with them, but it does make me give them the side-eye at a minimum.

I don't know anything about Secular Talk though.
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  #4405  
Old 01-28-2017, 12:36 AM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

Donnie Dump: I lost the popular vote to fraud because some old racist German golfer saw beaners at a polling place in Florida.
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  #4406  
Old 01-28-2017, 02:18 AM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

Your link suggests Trump made up the story whole cloth, or he heard an urban legend and made up names to go with it. The article tells us the German golfer isn't a US citizen and shouldn't expect to vote.

I though GWB was stupid - no comparison. Trump literally constructs fantasy worlds and acts on them. He's like the anti-skeptic president.
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  #4407  
Old 01-28-2017, 02:39 AM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

Quote:
Originally Posted by specious_reasons View Post
Trump literally constructs fantasy worlds and acts on them. He's like the anti-skeptic president.



14 minutes. His policies are the last thing he saw.

Also, there's a hilarious Tweet thread behind that.
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  #4408  
Old 01-28-2017, 11:48 AM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

Quote:
Originally Posted by specious_reasons View Post
Your link suggests Trump made up the story whole cloth, or he heard an urban legend and made up names to go with it. The article tells us the German golfer isn't a US citizen and shouldn't expect to vote.

I though GWB was stupid - no comparison. Trump literally constructs fantasy worlds and acts on them. He's like the anti-skeptic president.
He's not stupid. Herr Drumpf firmly believes that German citizens (as long as they're white) should be allowed to vote in US elections. (Let's not get started on Russian citizens.)

It might be stupid to reveal this belief if it could get him into trouble with his supporters. But compared to them he's a genius.
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  #4409  
Old 01-28-2017, 12:55 PM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

Trump Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself | aNtiDoTe Zine

Dumb clickbait title, I thought, but actually it's borne out. Might be better stated as "Trump's campaign team - and the Brexit LEAVE campaign - know you better than you know yourself. And other European campaigns are buying the same manipulation."

Quote:
an unauthorized translation of a December 2016 article that caused quite a stir in the German-language press.
Links to original here: Ich habe nur gezeigt, dass es die Bombe gibt - Das Magazin - Das Magazin

In a nutshell, Big Data analysis by Cambridge Analytica (their press release claiming some credit for Trump's win; article says Steve Bannon is a board member) helped both the Brexit result and the Trump result. Most of the article is about one of the founders of the technology used emphasising that he wasn't a founder of that company and isn't responsible.

Quote:
It is therefore not at all the case, as is so often claimed, that statisticians lost this election because their polls were so faulty. The opposite is true: statisticians won this election. It was just certain statisticians, the ones using the new method. It is a cruel irony of history that Trump, who often grumbled about scientific research, used such a highly scientific approach in his campaign.
Quote:
“Pretty much every message that Trump put out was data-driven,” Alexander Nix explained to Das Magazin. On the day of the third presidential debate between Trump and Clinton, Trump’s team blasted out 175,000 distinct test variations on his arguments, mostly via Facebook. The messages varied mostly in their microscopic details, in order to communicate optimally with their recipients: different titles, colors, subtitles, with different images or videos. The granularity of this message tailoring digs all the way down to tiny target groups, Nix told Das Magazin. “We can target specific towns or apartment buildings. Even individual people.”

In the Miami neighborhood of Little Haiti, Trump’s campaign regaled residents with messages about the failures of the Clinton Foundation after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, in order to dissuade them from turning out for Clinton. This was one of the goals: to get potential but wavering Clinton voters—skeptical leftists, African-Americans, young women—to stay home. To “suppress” their votes, as one Trump campaign staffer bluntly put it. In these so-called dark posts (paid Facebook ads which appear in the timelines only of users with a particular suitable personality profile), African-Americans, for example, were shown the nineties-era video of Hillary Clinton referring to black youth as “super predators.”
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  #4410  
Old 01-28-2017, 04:33 PM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...-trump-cartoon
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  #4411  
Old 01-28-2017, 08:32 PM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

Quote:
Originally Posted by JoeP View Post
Trump Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself | aNtiDoTe Zine

Dumb clickbait title, I thought, but actually it's borne out. Might be better stated as "Trump's campaign team - and the Brexit LEAVE campaign - know you better than you know yourself. And other European campaigns are buying the same manipulation."

Quote:
an unauthorized translation of a December 2016 article that caused quite a stir in the German-language press.
Links to original here: Ich habe nur gezeigt, dass es die Bombe gibt - Das Magazin - Das Magazin

In a nutshell, Big Data analysis by Cambridge Analytica (their press release claiming some credit for Trump's win; article says Steve Bannon is a board member) helped both the Brexit result and the Trump result. Most of the article is about one of the founders of the technology used emphasising that he wasn't a founder of that company and isn't responsible.

Quote:
It is therefore not at all the case, as is so often claimed, that statisticians lost this election because their polls were so faulty. The opposite is true: statisticians won this election. It was just certain statisticians, the ones using the new method. It is a cruel irony of history that Trump, who often grumbled about scientific research, used such a highly scientific approach in his campaign.
Quote:
“Pretty much every message that Trump put out was data-driven,” Alexander Nix explained to Das Magazin. On the day of the third presidential debate between Trump and Clinton, Trump’s team blasted out 175,000 distinct test variations on his arguments, mostly via Facebook. The messages varied mostly in their microscopic details, in order to communicate optimally with their recipients: different titles, colors, subtitles, with different images or videos. The granularity of this message tailoring digs all the way down to tiny target groups, Nix told Das Magazin. “We can target specific towns or apartment buildings. Even individual people.”

In the Miami neighborhood of Little Haiti, Trump’s campaign regaled residents with messages about the failures of the Clinton Foundation after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, in order to dissuade them from turning out for Clinton. This was one of the goals: to get potential but wavering Clinton voters—skeptical leftists, African-Americans, young women—to stay home. To “suppress” their votes, as one Trump campaign staffer bluntly put it. In these so-called dark posts (paid Facebook ads which appear in the timelines only of users with a particular suitable personality profile), African-Americans, for example, were shown the nineties-era video of Hillary Clinton referring to black youth as “super predators.”
Now also picked up here:
The Data That Turned the World Upside Down | Motherboard
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  #4412  
Old 01-30-2017, 07:56 AM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

New Lessons from Problems with Approval Voting in Practice - FairVote

Argues that approval voting does not work very well in competitive elections, though it's OK for deciding what movie one wants to watch.
Quote:
Viability and the issue of majority rule: If voters truly are free with their approvals in an approval voting election, it’s quite possible two or more candidates could earn more than half the vote. Indeed, it’s possible that a candidate whom well over half of voters see as a top choice could lose to someone who nobody sees as their top choice. Approval voting advocates defend such outcomes as fair, but it remains to be seen what voters would say.

Workability in the real world: In approval voting elections, you can’t indicate support for more than one candidate without support for a lesser choice potentially causing the defeat of your first choice. This transparent dilemma for voters trying to cast a smart vote has immediate consequences. Because most voters as a result of this problem will refrain from approving of more than one candidate, the system in practice ends up looking far more like a plurality voting election system than a majority system.
Whatever is to be said about that, it seems to me that approval voting will be just like IRV in supporting a two-party system, as long as all the electoral districts are single-member ones. Maurice Duverger of Duverger's law noted that two-ballot top-two runoff systems tend to produce two main parties and lots of smaller ones. So the problem here is single-member districts, and approval voting does not cure that problem.

One needs to go to multimember ones to get good representation of multiple parties and indeed, many nations use proportional representation in their legislatures.

That article noted
Quote:
Approval voting has never faced voters on the ballot -- although it was repealed in 2009 by a vote of 81% of Dartmouth alumni after it was tried for electing trustees to the alumni board and contributed to a perception that tactical voters were getting an advantage over other voters.
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  #4413  
Old 01-30-2017, 03:35 PM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

Ah, well to be honest, I consider range voting to be preferable to approval voting. You can rate your top choices above other candidates.

It's just that approval voting is simpler and strategic voting within range voting tends to be the same as approval voting. While I would probably still vote purely strategically, the expressiveness of range voting would be helpful to the "voting is about the purity of my principles, not who will run the country" crowd.

But it may be in practice that it has similar issues.
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  #4414  
Old 02-08-2017, 04:54 AM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

like dis if u cri evrytiem
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  #4415  
Old 02-21-2017, 05:50 PM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

I found this a very rational and dispassionate dissection of what just happened in November. I should comment, but the whole thing is relevant, concise, not rambling. Read it and see if you disagree. Some of it we may not want to hear, but we had better let it sink in. I feel these are the lessons to apply next time around. Basically, we aren't going to win the white working class, so let's stop wasting our resources. Keith Ellison in 2020.

Obama Pollster Dishes on the Failures that Led to President Trump | Alternet
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  #4416  
Old 04-07-2017, 06:14 AM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

Quote:
Originally Posted by davidm View Post
Moreover, with respect to Clinton and Trump, it’s not even clear, in certain key respects, that Clinton is the lesser of two evils
Let's see how that's holding up... It's kind of amazing how poorly it does, even less than 100 days into Trump's administration.
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Trump says he will be “neutral” in the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Hillary is an unabashed fan of the vile Bibi Netanyahu and best buds with the odious Henry Kissinger. Lesser of two evils: Trump.
The evidence so far is... not great. He named his lawyer ambassador to Israel, who supports moving the embassy to Jerusalem, the expansion of settlements, criticized Clinton as too unfriendly to Israel, compared moderate group J Street to Holocaust collaborators, etc. On the other hand, in terms of concrete steps not much has happened. So it's possible he ends up like a conventional Republican.

How this would be better than Clinton, who was a conventional Democrat on Israel, is unclear. (And reports were that she and Bibi did not have a particularly friendly relationship when she was Sec of State, but whatevs.)
Quote:
Hill and Bill have supported and pushed through the trade deals that have enriched the rich, hollowed out the American industrial base and created overseas sweat shops. Trump (and Bernie Sanders) oppose these deals. Lesser of two evils: Trump.
Clinton opposed the TPP and it seemed headed for death regardless of the outcome of the election. Meanwhile... his renegotiations are... well, they seem to be headed nowhere. Because he's not actually a good negotiator. And so he has dramatically scaled back expectations. And I rather suspect that if he actually does anything, it will end up being more favorable for corporations, not workers.

Given that Clinton would've been susceptible to pressure from the left... whereas Trump is very clearly susceptible to pressure from the right (which does not want progressive trade policy)... it seems maybe to wind up being a wash... then again, if he starts a trade war, it will be Trump being worse.
Quote:
Trump (rather courageously) went down south and told the Republican base that the Iraq War was a bad deal and that, essentially, George W. Bush was a gibbering idiot.
Well, as we all know, he lied about his views at the time. But sure, he did do that.
Quote:
Hillary famously voted for that war, which has had disastrous consequences reverberating to this very day, and so far as I know she has never recanted this support.
We did cover that she did, in fact, recant her support.
Quote:
Trump, by contrast, has indicated that he’s not so interested in gallivanting abroad to find dragons to slay.
Well, now this is awkward, what with his Sec of State declaring that removing Assad is now their goal, and that they just launched dozens of missiles at a Syrian-Russian airbase.
Quote:
Lesser of two evils: Trump.
I suppose it's possible that Hillary would have fired the missiles in less than three months, after two days of deliberation in reaction to a chemical attack that they may not have all the facts on, and in defiance of the party base who elected her.

I mean, in theory.
Quote:
Trump has indicated, defying Republican dogma (as he has defied it on the Iraq war and free trade orthodoxy) that he has no interest in cutting entitlements.
In reality, just as I said during the primaries, he was in fact very open to cutting entitlements. Because he's a liar and because he's a Republican. He pushed hard (in his laughably ineffectual way) for the AHCA which cut something like $800 billion from Medicaid, and of course gutted the subsidies in the ACA, which would have pushed tens of millions of people off of health insurance. So it turns out he has at least a little interest in cutting entitlements.
Quote:
Hillary will try to cut them in her typical Clinton-style triangulating with Republicans, striking some kind of nonsense budget deal. This is because Hillary is not a New Deal Democrat, but rather a New Democrat
Well, I guess we can't know. But I do know Hillary Clinton was one of the people praising the failure of the AHCA. Which was not at all a surprise.
Quote:
The New Democrats have sold out the legacy of the four New Deal Democratic presidents (F.D.R., Truman, JFK and LBJ) and will continue to conspire with Republicans to betray and dismantle their legacy.
If the "New Democrats" include Schumer and Pelosi and many other Democrats in Congress, which I suspect you would, I don't get the impression you would like either of them... it would appear that not a single one of them was willing to conspire with Republicans to gut Medicaid. Not a single Congressional Democrat supported the AHCA. Not even Joe Manchin. So that part is holding up well too.
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Trump, I’m betting, won’t do that. Lesser of two evils: Trump.
Oh this one was the most accurate yet.
Quote:
The reason that Trump horrifies the G.O.P. elites so much is that they know he is not really a Republican.
Of course, in several important posts he appointed standard Republicans, and where he didn't, he picked people who are either more extreme than standard Republicans (Sessions) or far less competent (Carson, DeVos, Perry, and it appears also perhaps Tillerson).

He has signed all the bills the Congressional GOP has sharted onto his desk, and went all in on the AHCA.

I can agree that he's more motivated by narcissism than ideology. The problem is that the situation he finds himself in (PREDICTABLY) is one in which Republicans have leverage over him, and Democrats don't. He has alienated Democrats, and made it basically impossible for them to work with him (the progressive base would scream their heads off if they worked with him). The Republicans have his ear, and, of course, they are the only people protecting him from more aggressive investigation of his shady ties and corruption. The Russia ties weren't obvious at this point, of course, but that Trump would be enriching himself and his family was utterly predictable. Since he needs the Congressional GOP to let him get away with that corruption, they have leverage over him. Since he can't work with Democrats and he cares about getting "wins" and signing legislation so he can say he's "doing stuff", he will work with Republicans instead.

War with the GOP is possible... but even then the best case scenario is basically... that Congress just doesn't do much of anything.
Quote:
This conjures the terrifying prospect of Trump hijacking their precious party and transforming it into something utterly unrecognizable to them
I believe the racism and sexism are quite recognizable to them, and have been for decades.
Quote:
Hillary isn’t going to change anything
Given how unlikely a Democratic House was, this was only slightly wrong. She would've been able to continue using executive orders and administrative rule making (like Tom Perez had done as Sec of Labor to expand overtime and impose fiduciary requirements on financial planners). And with a Democratic Senate (reasonably likely conditional on a Clinton victory) she would've gotten a liberal majority on the SCOTUS and continued appointing liberals to lower courts. Not revolutionary, but a liberal SCOTUS would've been a pretty big deal.
Quote:
Lesser of two evils: Trump.
Yeah, not sure that's holding up.
Quote:
most of these people are victims and have legitimate beefs. Their jobs have been shipped overseas, their wages have stagnated, their kids can only afford college if they take on staggering debt that haunt them for a lifetime. Hillary won’t do anything about this. Will Trump? I don’t know. Maybe. Lesser of two evils on this one (provisionally): Trump.
More accurately, a Republican-controlled Congress won't do anything about these.

Would Hillary have signed a law making college tuition free at community colleges and at public universities (perhaps with an income cutoff)? It seems highly likely that, yes, she would have. Would she have used what executive authority she did have to benefit students? That also seems likely (although maybe she wouldn't have been as bold as she could have). Would she have signed a minimum wage increase, even a $15/hr one? That also seems incredibly likely. Would she have continued with a Labor department similar to Perez's? Probably. Will Trump do any of those things? That's an obvious no. If in 2018, a Democratic Congress puts those things on his desk, does anyone think he will sign them? And even if he does, would it be any different from Clinton then?

Seems that yet again, Trump is not the lesser of two evils.

Oh I guess Trump did make some tweets about outsourcing early on, and a few companies changed their plans (although in some cases, it was merely rescheduling until the spotlight was off them). He seems to have lost interest though. Tweeting at specific companies was never going to be a real policy, of course. Will a real policy that reduces outsourcing come out of Congress or an executive department? Let's say I'm not holding my breath. He used the Carrier people, and now he's done with them, he could give a shit about them anymore.
Quote:
I predict that in November, many Sanders voters will defect to Trump and he will make big inroads in the Rust Belt states of the Midwest that are usually Blue States. If he does that while holding the traditional Red States, he will be elected president.
Oh... well, here's the one part that holds up.

Of course, it might not have held up so well if so many so-called progressives hadn't been out there pushing the notion that these ideas about Trump were remotely plausible. Trump the pacifist. Trump the champion of the social safety net. Trump, who wants to build infrastructure and will stop outsourcing. Maybe if some people had spent their time critiquing these damaging fantasies instead of promoting them, it could've flipped a few votes.

BONUS

Quote:
Originally Posted by davidm View Post
I will add that I think Trump, if elected, will do nothing to impede gay or transgender rights
Trump and DeVos have gotten to work making bathrooms a problem for transgender students. And he rescinded an Obama rule to ensure that federal contractors don't discriminate against LGBT people. And he has repeatedly toyed with signing an executive order that makes it "religious freedom" to discriminate against LGBT people. He hasn't yet, perhaps due to Ivanka and Jared's influence. But I'm sure Pence and the rest of the Christofascists will keep pushing it, and in the end, they have more leverage over Trump.

On the other hand, Clinton, who gave a speech advocating gay rights to the UN and changed State Department rules to make it easy for trans people to change their passports, took longer than she should have to support marriage equality. So who knows who would really have been better.
Quote:
and will not appoint Scalias to the Supreme Court.
This is true! The right-wing extremist piece of shit he nominated, who may actually be more right-wing than Scalia, is named Gorsuch, not Scalia! The era of Scalias on the court is over, permanently.

:phew: dodged a bullet. This will also benefit the LGBT rights that Trump is so in favor of.
Quote:
All his rhetoric suggesting he will do such stuff is malarky to gull the rubes he knows he must court to win the nomination of the Dumb Party.
But in reality, it was the moderate talk was the bullshit to gull the rubes, including left-wingers who then concluded it was safe to vote Stein, or not important to go out and vote.
Quote:
The G.O.P. elites hate and fear Trump (just check out the hysterics at the Red State blogs) because they know he essentially is a socially liberal Democrat from New York who in the past has supported abortion rights, gun control, higher taxes on the "hedge fund guys" and has donated to and schmoozed with Hillary and other Demos.
Ah yes. Well, I'm waiting on his pro-choice policy, the gun control and the tax increases on the rich guys. So far he has reinstated and expanded the global gag rule against abortion and nominated someone anti-abortion to the Supreme Court, and has only talked about cutting taxes, and predictably, the only specifics we've seen (AHCA and some vague tax plans) gave massive tax cuts to the wealthy. The gun control isn't there, but the fascistic support of the police is. Does threatening to send the Feds into Chicago count as gun control?
Quote:
No, indeed, even if you support the "lesser of two evils" voting idea, it's not at all clear who the lesser evil is here.
Well, I hope it's clear now.

Last edited by erimir; 04-07-2017 at 06:56 AM.
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  #4417  
Old 04-07-2017, 06:51 AM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

Extra bonus:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Watser? View Post
Quote:
the GOP is a threat to the world
Sorry dudes, but I am still trying to juggle my relief that Clinton is not going to start WW3 over a no-fly zone in Syria with my sadness about what happens inside the US. But as for 'the world', I am still not sure we are off worse with Trump.
Well, it's true that Clinton didn't make a no-fly zone in Syria.

Instead it's Trump lobbing missiles at them. Well that's a relief!

Of course, I think it was an exaggeration to say that this would've started WW3 under Clinton, and I don't think it's likely to escalate that far under Trump either. But if one of them was going to impulsively escalate a war into a much broader conflict and deliberately target civilians and such, my money's on the idiot who doesn't know shit about squat, doesn't think before he runs his mouth, is obsessed with winning and appearing strong, wonders why we have nukes if we're not going to use them, and thinks we should murder the families of terrorists.
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  #4418  
Old 04-07-2017, 05:38 PM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

I will respond in more detail to Erimir’s post later when I find some time, which I’m always short of, but for now I’ll say this.

I have always qualified that IF Trump meant some of the things that he said, THEN he would seem to be the lesser of two evils than Hillary on a number of key issues. I don’t think I ever had any illusions that he was anything other than a narcissist and a liar. I don’t think anyone who reads back through this thread, which includes my many mocking satires of Herr Drumpf, can have any doubt what I think of him. So it’s curious that you resurrect these quotes wholly wrenched from context.

And yeah, as a matter of fact, I do think that if Hillary were president, we already would not just have an attack on Syria, but no-fly zones as well. She still SUPPORTS those things — has ALWAYS supported them, and opposed Obama’s temperance on these matters.

But you seem to want to imply that I am a poor predictor of Trump’s behavior — but I never made any such predictions. I always qualified what I said about Trump’s potential with a big IF — if he would do the things he talked about. Because a great many things he talked about were indeed at odds with both Republican and neo-con Hillary-style orthodoxy. I suppose this is of a piece with your (false) statement that I predicted Romney would beat Obama in 2012.

But what I did effectively predict way back last summer, or at least state what was quite plausible, was that Trump would hold the red states and then peel off a few Rust Belt states (I specifically talked about Michigan, where I am from) and win the presidency. I did this in the context of lamenting that Bernie did not get the nomination. Bernie would not have lost the Rust Belt.

I believe it was then that you mocked my predictive abilities in your defense of Hillary, because, I guess, just what the U.S. needed was … another four to eight years of the Clintonistas! Heaven forfend that we a real Democrat be put back in the White House.

As to the election results … who turned out to be right, and why?

Not you.
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  #4419  
Old 04-07-2017, 07:47 PM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

Sorry: disclaimer: I remember that davidm decided to vote for Hillary.

The point was that it was

1. obvious that Trump was not going to expand the social safety net or be a level-headed commander-in-chief who understands that sometimes doing nothing is the right move, doesn't feel that provocations demand a response, etc. Even at the time. That his LGBT talk, much like his talk of helping "the blacks", was just pandering bullshit. That he was going to have to work with the GOP, and that he would appoint someone Mitch McConnell approved to the Supreme Court (because without that, what's the point for McConnell?) Shifting the court to the left was never going to happen, and if Trump had attempted it, he would've been shot down.

2. it was stupid for people on the left to suggest that he might do those things, and being right about the outcome of the election does not make it any less stupid.

You were right about where Clinton was weak, but I don't recall you predicting she would win the popular vote. And of course, the extraordinary interventions of Russia/Wikileaks and rogue FBI agents/Comey were not really predictable back during the primaries. Your clairvoyance did not extend to the aspects of the election that were more difficult to predict.

But you correctly predicted the binary "will Trump win or not" and that the blue states where her polling was relatively weak compared to Obama's would be where she lost. Of course, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were all ranked highly on 538's tipping point states, so if you were constructing a winning map for Trump, it was highly likely to go through the Midwest (just as, of course, Bush had to win a swing state in the Midwest in both 2000 and 2004). So credit to you for that unique insight.

I mean, I gave a whole long list of you predicting things (even as possibilities!) that were never going to happen and were stupid ideas to promote (given that ideas like that almost certainly contributed to some voters deciding not to vote for Clinton), but you got one thing right. So you sure showed me.

And yeah, I'm sure Hillary would have gotten us into a war with Russia by now :jerkoff:

(And of course, as I made clear many times, I did not think Bernie would have been a bad nominee or a bad president. But by March he had no chance of winning, and heaven forfend we not spend months attacking our almost-certain nominee as a corrupt liar. Heaven forfend we not go around posting idiotic ideas about how maybe Trump was better and that Hillary was going to betray every good thing she ever said and was absolutely committed to every bad thing she ever said.)
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  #4420  
Old 04-07-2017, 07:49 PM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

Quote:
Originally Posted by erimir View Post
I suppose it's possible that Hillary would have fired the missiles in less than three months, after two days of deliberation in reaction to a chemical attack that they may not have all the facts on, and in defiance of the party base who elected her.

I mean, in theory.
Hillary Clinton called for airstrikes on Syria hours before Trump ordered airstrikes on Syria.

About that "in theory" ...
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  #4421  
Old 04-07-2017, 08:08 PM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

I don't see how this is arguable - even accepting the worst (non-chem-trail level insanity anyway) views of Clinton, Trump's open nepotism and corruption dwarf what she's been accused of, and he's either towing the line or diving over it on every anti-progressive Republican platform. And since either option looks to be some degree of hawkish, I'd prefer the one that knows what the fuck they're doing. Finally, to be frank, I'd prefer a President who was belligerent with Russia than one that's their pet Manchurian Candidate. There exists no possible world where Trump was the lesser evil.

ETA: And I think that was obvious from the start. It seems to take a lot of mental contortions, charity toward Trump's rhetoric, and a corresponding lack of charity toward Clinton's rhetoric (and ignoring her actual record of public service), to have come up to the election thinking there was any chance he was the lesser evil.
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  #4422  
Old 04-07-2017, 08:11 PM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

Saying that and doing it that very night are not the same thing. And of course, you ignored the bolded parts (because yes, I realized that Hillary might've done something in Syria)
Quote:
Originally Posted by erimir View Post
I suppose it's possible that Hillary would have fired the missiles in less than three months, after two days of deliberation in reaction to a chemical attack that they may not have all the facts on, and in defiance of the party base who elected her.
I can believe she would've said we need to do something about Syria by this point. But I don't think she would've said Assad is fine, we're not concerned, and then a few days later launch missiles at him.

She would be getting intelligence briefings and have a State Dept that was staffed (perhaps mostly with Obama holdovers due to Senate GOP obstruction), whereas Trump has basically nobody below the cabinet secretaries.

Perhaps she would end up doing the same thing. But I have no doubt there would be more deliberation and more strategy involved. Given that there would be deliberation, and probably public statements beforehand, the left would've had an opportunity to make their displeasure known, which might have stayed her hand or modified her approach. So it seems to me that it would still be better to have Clinton in there.

But of course, your point was that Hillary was worse on foreign policy not "about the same on the subject of Syria."

And that, of course, Trump had a coherent idea in his head that going after dragons to slay was bad. Which looks to be panning out real well.

And of course, it was obviously bullshit given that he supported the invasion of Iraq and said we needed to do something to Gaddafi in Libya before that intervention as well. But you still said it, like it was a plausible thing that could be true.
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  #4423  
Old 04-08-2017, 03:47 AM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

I keep wondering why you are erecting this colossus of straw and then attacking it. About the only thing you got exactly right in post #4419 was that I did not vote for Trump, so obviously I did not think him actually to be the lesser of two evils, did I? I never even for a millisecond contemplated voting for him, and as I noted previously, all one needs to do is read back through this thread to see what I thought of him right from the get-go.

By implication if not outright assertion, your resurrection of my old “lesser of two evil” posts is to suggest that I was actually saying he was the lesser of two evils, and/or that I was predicting his behavior should he win. I was doing neither. I was merely pointing that given many of his stated positions during the campaign, which often ran dramatically against Republican orthodoxy, he could certainly seem to be the lesser of two evils than Clinton with respect to those particular positions. But I also made it clear that no one should believe his stated positions on these issues; but then again, no one should believe anything any politician says. Disbelief is the rational default position.

I also said that Trump, if elected and if he stuck to some of these positions, could be a transformational president, actually positioning the Republican Part to the left of the Democrats and perhaps ushering in a new electoral majority. I did not predict he would do that, but simply offered it as intriguing possibility. And in fact, he could still do this, even though I don’t think he will. But then again, less than a week ago, his bombing Assad would have been utterly unthinkable. His administration even explicitly said that removing Assad from power was no longer an U.S. goal. And then, a few days later — airstrikes!

The point is, nobody knows what Trump will do from day to day or even minute to minute, most likely because he is deranged.

As to Clinton, if memory serves, she certainly had not wrapped up the nomination by March; but even if she had, Bernie had every right and even an obligation to keep running against her to promote the progressive agenda. Your idea that people should have rolled over and shut up for Hillary and that people who voted for minor-party candidates committed some terrible crime is fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-progressive, to say nothing of wholly unrealistic. It just doesn’t work that way. American history is replete with third-, fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-party candidates, to say nothing of political insurgencies, protests, boycotts of unsuitable candidates and so on. In fact, some mix of the above is how the Party of Lincoln got started (that same party today is the Party of Jeff Davis).

So you can complain all you want about people vilifying Saint Hillary or voting for the Green Party candidate instead of her, but tough shit. People will say and do what they want regardless of your wishes, and that's a good thing.

I think that all of my critiques of Clinton were and are just, but I supported her over Trump because — even if I did believe (which I didn’t) that Trump would do things to the left of Clinton with respect to trade, jobs, and war and peace — I happen to think he is deranged. That alone would disqualify anyone from being president, even if they had good ideas.
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  #4424  
Old 04-08-2017, 04:20 AM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

Quote:
Originally Posted by erimir View Post
(And of course, as I made clear many times, I did not think Bernie would have been a bad nominee or a bad president. But by March he had no chance of winning, and heaven forfend we not spend months attacking our almost-certain nominee as a corrupt liar. Heaven forfend we not go around posting idiotic ideas about how maybe Trump was better and that Hillary was going to betray every good thing she ever said and was absolutely committed to every bad thing she ever said.)
I’m not sure who you are talking about here — me? So, I am to blame for Hillary losing? :lol: Gosh, I wish I had such powers. But let’s remember a couple of things: As per my fresh post upthread, my argument was not that “maybe Trump was better”; but rather than, if one were to believe his stated positions on certain key issues, he could indeed seem to be the lesser of two evils on those issues to tens of millions of working-class voters.

The second thing to remember is that no one links to :ff: — so, most likely my brilliant satires on all the candidates and my incisive political commentary have largely gone unread. :sad:

Or I suppose you are probably criticizing progressive Bernie voters in general for continuing to attack Clinton even when it seemed likely she would win the nomination. But this gets to the heart of why you now retroactively belittle my articulation last summer of a plausible Rust Belt path to victory from Trump, and why you are mistaken to do so.

You see, Erimir, you’ve got it precisely bassackwards. People from the left attacking Hillary did not cause Hillary to lose the election. Hillary caused Hillary to lose the election. Bernie supporters yelling from the left at you Hillary supporters were saying loud and clear:

Wake up! She doesn’t connect with the working class. That’s because she’s a Wall Street tool. She is not a good candidate. This is a Change Year. Either Bernie or Trump is likely to go to the White House. Why? Because tens of millions of working-class people have been utterly shit upon by for decades by the neoliberal globalist agenda embraced by both parties and they are fucking fed up.

And she lost.

Blame you and her, not me or Bernie supporters, for the calamity of Trump.

You own it, not us.

BTW, Bill Clinton knew Hill was a shitty candidate (which doesn’t mean he thought she would be a bad president) and specifically objected to Hillary’s sparse campaigning, in the general election, in the Rust Belt states. But by all insider accounts his concerns were disregarded and he was pushed aside.
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  #4425  
Old 04-08-2017, 05:58 AM
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Default Re: 2016 Presidential Race

Quote:
Originally Posted by davidm View Post
By implication if not outright assertion, your resurrection of my old “lesser of two evil” posts is to suggest that I was actually saying he was the lesser of two evils, and/or that I was predicting his behavior should he win. I was doing neither. I was merely pointing that given many of his stated positions during the campaign, which often ran dramatically against Republican orthodoxy, he could certainly seem to be the lesser of two evils than Clinton with respect to those particular positions. But I also made it clear that no one should believe his stated positions on these issues;
Well, actually, you said, as I quoted:

"it’s not even clear, in certain key respects, that Clinton is the lesser of two evils."

You did not, in fact, append that panoply of hedges that you just gave.

In fact, you responded to my initial response with
Quote:
Dismissing my list of all the ways that Trump may in fact be the lesser of two evils with respect to Clinton with :rolleyes: is pretty unpersuasive. In fact, I shall take that as your concession that you have no answer to these points.
Which certainly doesn't sound like you thought they were generally implausible but you were entertaining it as a thought experiment or something. Because otherwise you might have said "Well, this is all hypothetical, not to be taken as particularly likely but I can understand why you would :rolleyes: if you thought I was presenting it as true or even likely." But I admit, this doesn't prove that you thought these were plausible scenarios.

Anyway, my position then was that it was, in fact, quite clear that she was the lesser of two evils. My point was that even the statement that it was "unclear" who was worse was obviously wrong back then. And that has been borne out by Trump's administration so far.

Even holding it up as an "intriguing possibility" (a term you did not use at the time) is just lending unwarranted credence to obvious bullshit. It was unwarranted even given that it was merely partial credence.

And the post where you discussed LGBT rights and the Supreme Court had no such disclaimers.
Quote:
I also said that Trump, if elected and if he stuck to some of these positions, could be a transformational president, actually positioning the Republican Part to the left of the Democrats and perhaps ushering in a new electoral majority. I did not predict he would do that, but simply offered it as intriguing possibility.
Well yeah. So? And if Hillary Clinton was elected and had been able to pass large portions of her agenda, she would actually have been a transformational president as well!

Universal childcare? A big fucking deal. Mandatory paid sick and family leave? Also a big deal. Ending the Hyde amendment? Expanding Obamacare? Free public college tuition for most students? Immigration reform? Raising the minimum wage? $275 billion in infrastructure spending? Criminal justice reform?

Maybe she should have sold it more as being transformational during the campaign, instead of defending "incrementalism". But in the universe where Clinton passes most of her agenda, she would have been overseeing the biggest expansion in the social welfare state since LBJ, surpassing Obama's passage of the ACA.

Of course, the sticker in both cases is those Republicans in Congress who would stymie any major progressive policies. The hypothetical that Clinton overcomes them to transform the country in a progressive direction is no more plausible when you change it to president Trump. "Sticking to those positions" wouldn't make Mitch McConnell and the dead-eyed granny starver renounce their principles and pass progressive legislation. And the fact that Trump brought a GOP Congress with him (which was of course likely to be the case in the event that he won) means that he can't even work with Democrats to do it and cut out the Republicans. He needs GOP votes to do anything. The GOP Senate will be particularly hard to dislodge given the map, so any scenario where Trump has a GOP Senate was going to be one where progressive legislation does not pass before 2021.
Quote:
As to Clinton, if memory serves, she certainly had not wrapped up the nomination by March
By March 15, Clinton was polling about 11 pts ahead of Sanders nationally, whereas he needed to win the remaining contests by 15 pts, and he was behind in polling in many of the large states. There was no reason at that point, when they had already had several debates and the issues of the campaign were pretty much hashed out, and Bernie's momentum in the polls had stalled after picking up most of the undecideds and so forth, to think that Bernie was going to get a massive 25 pt swing in the polls.
Quote:
but even if she had, Bernie had every right and even an obligation to keep running against her to promote the progressive agenda.
That would've been fine, if that's how he had actually run his campaign. Instead he ran on outright conspiratorial bullshit about the primaries being rigged, Hillary giving speeches to Goldman Sachs (saying he'd release his taxes when she releases her speeches - of course, she had released her taxes, which is how people found out about the speeches!) and generally a bunch of character attacks. In addition to some other weird shit like never releasing his tax returns and lying about being invited to the Vatican by the Pope. Those things don't really promote the progressive agenda.

I had no problem with him running on the issues. But he switched to character attacks, which were more damaging and more difficult to mitigate later (and he didn't even really try to mitigate the character attacks in the general, running purely on the platform... after basically telling everyone she couldn't be trusted to enact it).

To be fair, I will say that Clinton should've tried to buy him off with policy concessions earlier (assuming she didn't - it's possible that behind the scenes she tried but he rebuffed her, but I'm going to assume that didn't happen). It would've been worth it to get him out of the race quickly even if she had to adopt a couple positions she thought were suboptimal for the general election.
Quote:
Your idea that people should have rolled over and shut up for Hillary
If you want her to win instead of Trump, you probably should talk about her positive aspects instead of bringing up things you don't like constantly. What a horrible thing to say, I know. It makes me a horrible anti-democratic person, asking people not to constantly attack the candidate that would be better for the country. I didn't ask people to lie about her, or say they love her foreign policy. Her platform actually had quite a few good things in it, yet for some reason these so-called progressives couldn't bring themselves to talk about how things like universal childcare and mandatory paid sick and family leave would help working people and be a big progressive achievement. No, instead they needed to talk about how they didn't like her bloodthirsty foreign policy before saying they're voting for her because Trump is worse..

And if you're Bernie Sanders, and you obviously would prefer Clinton to win instead of Trump, and you should be able to recognize that the rules of the primaries mean that you have very little chance of winning, you should also calibrate your campaign so as to avoid helping Trump win. I know, that makes me a monster who hates progress, but if you actually don't want Trump to win, because he would be a disaster for the country, you should not take actions that make his victory more likely.
Quote:
and that people who voted for minor-party candidates committed some terrible crime is fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-progressive, to say nothing of wholly unrealistic.
Crime?

I've always said that they've done something counterproductive and stupid. That they could've made Trump's victory less likely and instead threw their vote away on purity posturing.

It's anti-democratic to critique other people's voting choices? Is it anti-democratic to say that voting for Trump was an idiotic thing to do as well then?

It's anti-progressive to critique actions which make progressive outcomes less likely? :rolleyes:

Unrealistic? Perhaps. It is unrealistic to believe that people will stop doing stupid things entirely. But I never said that I thought they would, so, you know...
Quote:
It just doesn’t work that way. American history is replete with third-, fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-party candidates, to say nothing of political insurgencies, protests, boycotts of unsuitable candidates and so on. In fact, some mix of the above is how the Party of Lincoln got started (that same party today is the Party of Jeff Davis).
This... seems irrelevant to anything I've ever said.

I've only ever discussed how people should vote. I did not predict that third parties would disappear for good, or anything like that. I will predict, however, that far fewer people will vote third-party in 2020, just as the third-party vote dropped off in 2004 after many Nader voters recognized their mistake. But yes, some people will still vote for Stein or whoever her idiot replacement is. How that makes me wrong about anything, I don't know.
Quote:
So you can complain all you want about people vilifying Saint Hillary or voting for the Green Party candidate instead of her, but tough shit. People will say and do what they want regardless of your wishes, and that's a good thing.
Yes, I can complain all I want. And other people can choose to ignore my recommendations. I'm not sure what relevance this is supposed to have to anything, given that I never said otherwise, but this is true.

It's a good thing that I can't be a dictator and force them to vote my way, sure, I guess. It's not a good thing that people choose to vote in stupid ways.
Quote:
I supported her over Trump because — even if I did believe (which I didn’t) that Trump would do things to the left of Clinton with respect to trade, jobs, and war and peace — I happen to think he is deranged. That alone would disqualify anyone from being president, even if they had good ideas.
Well, we're in agreement on that. His derangement is underrated by many people as an issue. In many respects so far, someone like Rubio would be just as bad (Rubio would have supported the AHCA, and signed Ryan/McConnell's shitty bills). But Marco Rubio is not a deranged narcissistic psychopath, which would make a President Rubio far less frightening.
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